SEO competitor analysis: free, simple and effective methods. What is SEO competitor analysis and why is it needed?

13.09.2020 SSD drives

With help online services you can immediately remove a set of ratings of all competitors’ sites and compare them with yours

To do this, you need to add your website to the list of competitors, upload the list to the Checktrust service, create new project, set the parameters that need to be removed (you can remove all available ones), wait for the analysis to complete, download the received data in Excel format.

What parameters will we get:

Age
Spam level
Number of pages in index
Number of links
Trust is a complex parameter of trust on the part of search engines
Page loading time - which is very important
Even attendance data is possible

*It is important to understand the specifics of programmatically collected data! The data may not be accurate; you should not rely on it blindly, especially when it comes to competitors’ attendance - this can only be taken into account as Additional information. Data from different analyzers may differ from each other.

But in any case, an approximate picture of how much your site is losing to competitors in terms of age, number of pages, quality and links will already be available to you.

Analysis of competitors' queries (keywords)

How to find out what queries your competitors are promoting for?

We look at what keywords their pages are optimized for.

We parse pages, for example, with the SeoFrog program. We get data on the title and description meta tags and look at what key phrases are in them.

We look at the headings H1-H6 on the website pages.

Install the SEO META in 1 CLICK extension in your browser. While on the landing page, activate the plugin and get data on the phrases that are used in the headings on the page.

To collect all the keywords for which the site is ranked in the Yandex and Google search engines, of course, you will have to use paid tools such as Semrush, SerpStat. But you can immediately obtain a large array of data for comparative semantic analytics. These services have it all detailed instructions to download the required parameters.

The main tasks of this stage of analysis:

Find out the keywords you should use to promote your site
Find keywords for which there are no sections or pages on your site to promote
Optimize the structure of your website sections for new key queries and directions
Evaluate the quality of your meta tags compared to competitors
Compare the depth of development of the semantic core of your site and competitors.

Analysis of competitors' texts

As part of the article, we can recommend the CheckTrust service, which will help you select the purest white donors.

Visual inspection and analysis of competitors' marketing

No services can replace a careful inspection and study of sites with your own eyes!

We research competitors, look for their successful solutions for:

Navigations (menus, widgets, navigation tips, linking)
Design of end-to-end blocks (header, footer)
Design of standard pages (home page, catalog section, product or service card, shopping cart, order form, contact page, about us, price list, etc.)
Content (images, texts, documents, videos, graphics, etc.)
Marketing (USP, promotions, conditions, special offers, etc.)
Design and decoration.

And of course we compare it with our website. If competitors have excellent, well-polished websites in terms of usability, content, internal optimization, navigation, etc., etc., and everything is dull and sad for you, then the chances drop significantly.

It is also worth paying more attention to the commercial factors of Yandex. One of the most important factors is the assortment! If you have much fewer goods and services than the top leaders, this will play a negative role when trying to promote.

How to use the data obtained to promote your website

So, you have carried out a selection and analysis of competitors on the Internet. What to do with this information?

Semantics and content

Make a plan for redesigning the structure of the website sections - which ones need to be added, maybe something can be eliminated
Set priorities for creating new pages and preparing information to fill them
Make a plan to develop semantics - which new clusters need to be studied more deeply

Internal optimization

Think about the existing pages on the site what can be changed in their optimization (rewrite texts, add new words, change markup and code)
Think about how to deal with common factors: design, functionality, commercial factors. It is impossible to promote a site that is far behind the top ones in terms of its technical equipment and design.

External optimization

Build a growth strategy reference mass, using quality donors who link to top competitors.

Good luck with your promotion!

Also, when you analyze competitors, all their “tricks” are clearly visible, many of them are suitable for use in your projects, and mistakes that also need to be studied in order to avoid making them in your own work. Is such an analysis necessary to correctly set tasks that will become one of the keys in building an overall SEO strategy?

This decides whether there are restrictions for promotion in search, identifies errors in the code and content, determines how good the usability and web design of the site are, and based on this we can draw a conclusion about the competitiveness of the resource in search results. In fact, after completing the competitor analysis, you will determine whether it makes sense to move on this request and what is needed in order to get to the top.

Competitor analysis is divided into several stages

The first stage “How to find competitors?”

This stage is most effective if you are starting to work with something new and have to start from the very beginning - this could be activity in a newly emerged area or with an unfamiliar client, about whom you are extremely lacking in information. Please note: your competitors are not only Internet resources engaged in the same activities as you. These can be any web pages that compete with you in the list of answers for similar queries.

So, you have a list and all the necessary information about possible competitors. Now is the time to confirm that they made the right choice. To do this, you need to conduct a full analysis of the list and select those who and in what positions are already ranked for the key phrases that you have identified for yourself.

In addition, at this stage you have the opportunity to increase the list of keywords and phrases using query analysis in Google services Keyword Planner and/or Suggestmrx. In this case, you need to use keywords for which competitors are not yet ranked in the top positions in search engine responses - this is one method that helps you get ahead of your competitors, but remember that they are also analyzing your site and may also try to rank for your keywords.

Stage two: “What should you pay attention to when doing SEO analysis of competitors?”

There are six main points on which to focus your analysis.

1. Link analysis. The link aspects of ranking are considered the most important, because more depends on the link strategy than on any other factor. When analyzing backlinks, you should consider the following parameters:

what dilutions were used;
number of referring domain names;
quality of donor websites;
link growth rate.

2. Analysis of the semantic core - the basics of website promotion. Proper selection of key phrases and distribution of them across resource web pages is a third of success. Consistent SEO analysis of competitors will really help you in forming a semantic core. The conversion statistics will be the most relevant, as it allows you to prepare a list of keys for which there is traffic. Special services that collect promoted keywords and open statistical data on visits will help you with this.

3. Content analysis. Recently, interesting and original content has become increasingly important for website promotion. If, during an SEO analysis of your competitors, you find that they have high-quality content, then you should write articles that are not inferior in quality and uniqueness to your competitors. If you write a really good text, other resources will link to it, which will be a good increase in popularity.

Now let's highlight what needs to be analyzed in the content: quality (this includes interestingness, usefulness, spelling), size, uniqueness and reviews, if any.

4. Structure analysis. Many people think that structure is a secondary goal of SEO optimization, but experience proves this belief wrong. If the site has convenient, logical navigation, and the structure is built in such a way that key words are evenly distributed across the landing pages, the site receives some advantage over others that did not take care of building the structure correctly.
Analyze the structure of TOP sites. Based on this analysis, make your structure, taking into account all the disadvantages and advantages.

5. Analysis of "chips". Many sites are increasingly using “tricks” - some useful functions that simplify working with the site, making it clear and intuitive. I will give examples of some of these “tricks”, without which the site will lose significantly, because the majority have already started using them:

Question-answer section (F.A.Q./FAQ)
Online user support
Exchange rates and online calculator (indispensable things for projects that require a lot of calculations)

In addition, there is a huge number of different features that you will find on every site. However, you should not cram the site with them. Choose for yourself only really useful things that will not be an empty “space occupier” on the resource.

6. Technical audit. After a thorough analysis of competitive sites, you need to draw up a basic strategy for promoting your site and begin a technical audit. Many SEO optimizers relegate on-page optimization to the background, and they pay for it more than once. Therefore, be sure to analyze:

What meta tags do competitors use?
Presence of errors Not Found 404.
Automatic redirects with index.php
Domain merging: with and without www.

From this stage we can conclude that the main goal of conducting an SEO analysis of competitors is to formulate a list of positive and negative aspects of their resources to adjust your own promotion strategy. In order to be in the TOP, you must always follow all the new products and delights of other sites in order to correct shortcomings in your SEO strategy. You can also highlight useful information from various sites devoted to this topic. One of mine, for example, can help you here.

The third stage “Comparing SEO competitors with yourself”

At the comparison stage, you already have a list of SEO competitors and the ability to compare their projects with yours in order to build the final search core and indicate the priority of key queries. Most likely, the decisive role here will be played by the volume of search traffic, the relevance of the key, the popularity of domain links, indexed pages, the current position in link ranking, as well as content optimization and the page’s place in the search results for your key query.

Stage four (last) “Selecting keywords”

At this stage, you will have to analyze all the collected information on your own and competing websites, and then select the keywords and phrases that are best suited for your site: the keywords with the highest volume of traffic, and the highest relevance.

Services and programs for competitor analysis will help you with SEO optimization. In addition to the traditional ones provided by popular search engines, there are also other tools and resources that may be useful to you in SEO analysis of competitors:

www.alexa.com/topsites and www.similarweb.com/global or ubersuggest.org/, tools.seochat.com/tools/related-keywords-tool/ - keyword data (will help you identify competitors);
www.semrush.com/, www.merlinox.com/suggest/index-en.php - data on keys (helps in identifying them);
authoritylabs.com/, positionly.com/, www.advancedwebranking.com/, - monitor positions in search results;

www.moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar
www.opensiteexplorer.org
www.explorer.cognitiveseo.com
majesticseo.com

These services will provide you with all the information on the links and help you analyze the popularity.

In addition to the above online resources, you can find a lot of SEO software on the Internet - programs that also simplify and automate SEO analysis of various sites. Perhaps they will be more convenient for you. Best choice will be:

Trust regger – PHP script, designed to automate registration on trust sites. The program is free. System requirements are very low. A PHP version higher than 5.2.4 and the CURL library are required.
NoHiddenLinks – literal translation of “No Hidden Links”. The purpose of this program is to search and discover hidden links in files and templates. The program is also free. Special requirements does not have.
AMS ENTERPRISE is a set of programs for conducting mass mailings via E-Mail. This tool solves all E-Mail marketing issues. The effectiveness of the program is very high, so it will become an indispensable assistant in your business. The program is paid, but you can easily find it on the Internet free versions programs with a “crack”.
Linkoscor – best helper in internal linking, and this is an important part of website optimization. The program has about 120 functions, conveniently distributed across seventeen sections. Using this program, you can bring your site to the TOP-25.
Email Extractor searches and collects target addresses from a variety of sources. Works great with AMS ENTERPRISE. Thus, a kind of symbiosis is formed - Extractor collects target E-Mail addresses, and AMS sends mailings to them.

I hope that this article, the methods, resources and SEO software provided in it will help you analyze your competitors efficiently, easily and quickly! If you have any questions, you can ask them in the comments or in a private message. Read mine and move forward in joy!

Why do competitor analysis at all?

Understand how things are in the niche, dive deeper into the topic of the client’s business, find non-obvious points that are important specifically for this topic. Analysis is important for making strategic decisions on the project and understanding the project’s place in the niche.

I want to immediately warn you about the risks. We will learn to read a competitor's strategy, but we will never have accurate data about whether it works - we can only guess and test.

I will focus on the analysis of online stores, since everything there is more or less easy to compare.

1. Setting goals

Every analysis should begin with setting goals. It is important not just to write down the indicators, but to understand what they tell:

in which areas you need to catch up with your competitors. SEO is still an integrated approach, the result depends on many factors;
what successful points of competitors’ strategy can be adopted;
what strategies competitors are not using. This question is especially relevant if the site being analyzed is a leader in its field.

For example, the following elements of the strategy can be called clearly successful:

creating additional types of pages, creating additional linking;
creating additional benefits for the user: installment plans, credit, discount systems, free shipping;
carrying out work to increase reviews using email newsletters after purchase.

By successful, I mean strategies that allow the project to grow and do not contradict the requirements of search engines. For example, a strategy of spamming and highlighting keywords in texts may give growth at first, but it contradicts the requirements of search engines and does not work in the long term.

2. Identifying competitor sites

Second important step— identify direct competitors.

2.1. Analyze search results for key queries

Explore search results for different groups of queries (high-frequency and mid-frequency) and select resources that are relevant to you and have a similar structure.

Enter the name of the site and view the competitor report. Pay attention to the “Common Keyphrases” and “Visibility” column. The more common keyword phrases, the more likely it is that the site is your direct competitor, and the greater the visibility, the more likely it is that the competitor is using a smart strategy.

Among the selected sites, check the region and see that the structure is similar. Avoid aggregators or sites with broad topics.

If the site is young, the “Competitors” section of Serpstat cannot be used - there will be almost no statistics or only weak competitor sites will be shown, which make no sense to focus on.

2.3. Take information from the client

The client knows his competitors well, so you can ask him for a list of their websites. However, it is worth remembering that this list is not final and the client can compete with these companies online, but not offline.

3. What to analyze and how to draw conclusions?

3.1. Domain age determination

You should compare the age of the analyzed domains - use Whois for this. If your project is young, you need to compensate by working harder on other ranking factors. Therefore, this needs to be taken into account in the strategy.

3.2. Attendance comparison

Traffic information can be taken from SimilarWeb. It allows you to see the total traffic to the site (data is approximate), the percentage of traffic from search, email, paid traffic and other channels.

What conclusions can be drawn after comparison:

understand whether there is room for improvement in the topic area;
which competitor has the most traffic and from which channel;
in the future, try to understand why the competitor has so much traffic and connect new channels.

The number of pages in the index can be checked using the "site:" operator.

If the difference between the number of pages in Yandex and Google is too large, then the site contains junk pages or other problems due to which the site is poorly ranked by the search engine.

3.4. Research of the semantic core

First of all, it is worth looking at the semantics of the site being analyzed. This can be done using Serpstat:

Pay special attention to those competitors who have the most words in semantic core. Next, try to understand why they have so many keywords.

Then you should download competitors’ semantics, which are used to rank competitors’ sites, but not your site.

which competitor has the most keywords;
is there room for improvement in the topic;
what pages can be added or optimized;
what new page types can be added;
in which product groups competitors are outperforming the project in terms of product range.

3.5. Structure analysis

Pay attention to the quality of the structure. Does a competitor bother to create pages? for low-frequency requests? Is the structure organized logically?

Does your competitor have any standard pages that you don’t have? What queries are covered by these pages?

How is the structure expanded: with tags, landing pages or filters?

After the analysis, you can understand the level of optimization of the site structure, the potential for expanding the structure and the direction in which it can be developed.

3.6. Content Comparison

It's important to understand what your competitors are doing in their content strategy.

To do this, we divide the site into types of pages that are useful for promotion:

home page;
categories/subcategories;
product cards;
blog pages;
other typical pages, depending on the niche.

3.6.1. Content analysis of the main, categories/subcategories includes the following points:

how many characters are in the text;
Is text markup used - headings H1, H2, H3;
whether images are used;
whether bulleted and numbered lists are used;
Is the content generally readable?
whether spam methods and keyword inclusion are used.

3.6.2. Content analysis of product cards may include the following items:

are there any informative product descriptions;
how many characters are in the description;
whether the content on product cards is spam;
are all the characteristics given, are there video reviews, reviews and other content useful to the user.

3.6.3. Blog page content research:

how often the content is published;
how many articles are there already;
how many characters does one article contain?
a blog is written based on requests, useful content is simply posted, or company news is just published.

After the analysis, you can draw conclusions about what texts to order by volume and what good tactics on filling out the product card can be adopted. Should you start a blog and how often should you publish content?

3.7. Meta information analysis

Analysis of Title, Description, Keywords, H1 headings is performed by dividing the site into the same types of pages as when analyzing content strategy:

home page analysis;
analysis of categories/subcategories;
analysis of product cards;
blog page analysis;
analysis of other typical pages.

The following should be taken into account:

is there any keyword spam?
are synonyms used?
only generation templates or manual meta tags are used;
is there a certain structure for constructing meta-information, what is it like;
is information about the unique selling proposition used in meta tags, is a call to action used in the USP; Is the USP clear?

As a result, it is possible to draw conclusions about whether competitors use spam methods and take them into strategy. good practices building meta-information, understanding the level of optimization of meta-information among competitors.

3.8. Comparison of link strategies

To obtain the necessary data, we use Ahrefs or Serpstat.

What can be compared:

number of referring pages;
number of referring domains;

anchor list (what it looks like: natural/unnatural);

After analyzing the results, you can understand whether the sites are promoting organically, using a mixed approach, or using spammy link building methods.

If, after analysis, it is clear that the competitor is using a smart link building strategy (the link profile is varied, mentions of the site on third-party resources look natural and are included in the topic, the resources are thematic), you can upload domains that link to the competitor’s site. It is also important to look at which regional domains are worth building links from, based on the experience of competitors. Then check the link quality indicators, filter out and get a list of domains for link building. It is important to avoid the temptation to mindlessly post where your competitors are posting, and avoid repeating spammy link strategies.

3.9. Linking analysis

The main types of pages are analyzed. It is necessary to determine whether manual linking is used in texts on category pages, linking from card pages to filter pages, additional linking blocks for cross-selling: “they buy with this product” or “cheaper in a set.” Other types of linking can also be used, which potentially increase the weight of the promoted pages.

3.10. Availability of https

The presence of an https version of the site gives, albeit a small, plus to ranking in search engines. After analyzing your competitors, you will be able to understand whether you need to move your site to https. If you are still on http, then why not move to https and get an additional advantage in ranking?

3.11. Presence of a mobile version of the site

Availability mobile version has long become not a feature, but a necessity - in order to reach an additional audience of mobile users. As a result, you can better understand which competitors are reaching the mobile audience and which are missing out on this opportunity.

3.12. Multiregional and multilingual

You should look to see if competitors have other language or regional versions of the site, as well as individual pages for regional requests.

Regional versions of a website or page for geo-queries may result in greater coverage of key queries.

3.13. Download speed

Analyzed for typical pages, for example:

home page;
categories/subcategories;
product cards;
blog pages;
other standard pages.

The check is performed for both the mobile and desktop versions. You can use Google Page Speed Insights or analogues (for example, GTMetrix, WebPageTest).

The main readings are recorded:

mobile version optimization percentage (N/100);
percentage of desktop version optimization (N/100);
mobile version server response time;
server response time of the desktop version.

If your site's loading speed is very slow compared to your competitors, increasing it should be a priority.

3.14. Social activity analysis

You should record the activity indicators of your subscribers on social networks. The most indicative is the number of likes/shares/comments/reposts of blog articles. On YouTube you can see the total number of views on a channel.

Based on the activities of subscribers and their involvement, you can see what social network should be included in the strategy if it is not already included. Especially if this channel is active among competitors.

3.15. Business Features Research

The question to ask is: why is a potential customer leaving for a competitor? Analyze possible options.

4. How to structure the results of competitor analysis

But it’s inconvenient to look at the table every time, so I recommend simply Google Docs write down conclusions based on the results of the analysis of each direction in the format:

[a few words about the situation now];
[what you need to do to get ahead of your competitors].

It is worth noting those points where your project is the leader - you need to know your strengths.

conclusions

When performing a general analysis of sites, you should pay attention to both General characteristics, and on specific areas that are important for promotion. Depending on the type of business, indicators can be removed or added.

Here are the basic ones:

domain age;
attendance;
number of pages in the index;
semantic core;
Site structure;
content;
meta information;
link strategy;
linking;
availability of https;
availability of a mobile version;
multiregional and multilingual;
download speed;
social activity;
business features.

At the start of work, such a superficial analysis is a must have for a specialist. It shows well the features of the topic and allows you to understand the current situation.

I would be glad to receive additions from you - what else can be analyzed and what will it give?

It is currently one of the most popular methods of brand promotion. And in order to achieve 100% success in this matter, experts use SEO competitor analysis both at the start and already in the process of promoting the resource.

What is SEO analysis of competitors' websites?

You are already asking yourself: why do you need competitor analysis and how can you use it? In response to this, we can say that this process is one of the most important stages in promotion. A thorough analysis of competitors' websites allows you to understand exactly how and for what queries they promote their resources. Based on the data obtained, it is much easier to prepare a semantic core, develop your own effective promotion strategy and make the project competitive in the market and on the Internet.

How to spend SEO analysis of competitors?

Based on your field of activity, tasks and popularity of business topics, analyzing competitors' websites can be quite difficult. Indeed, to carry it out, it is important to take into account many factors at the same time. The following algorithm of actions will help to simplify the process at the stage of preparing the semantic core.

Stage 1. Identifying Potential SEO Competitors

This stage can be called preliminary, but it is no less useful and important, because when building cooperation with a completely new, little-known client in a new industry, a team of specialists, as a rule, knows nothing about it. A lack of information can lead to errors when compiling a semantic core for a website and may not take into account the specifics of your business. Therefore, you should carefully consider this task and, if necessary, provide a list of your business competitors to the SEO company.

It is necessary to understand that potential competitors for an SEO company are not only individuals and companies that offer similar products and services. This is also any other site that simply competes with the promoted object in search engine results for identical key queries. It is the entire range of competitors that will be considered by specialists.

Stage 2. Confirming the correct choice of SEO competitors

After carefully studying possible competitors, it is time to make sure that you have made the right choice. What needs to be done for this? View the list and highlight those companies and sites that are currently ranking for the keywords you have selected. Note what positions they are in now.

In addition, you can also expand the semantic core by analyzing key queries using various services. Add to the list keywords that you became aware of after studying competitors’ sites, as well as similar phrases for which you are not promoting, but can get your share of traffic to the site. Here you should not forget about the relevance of the request to your site (i.e. if you do not sell parquet boards, then you do not need such a keyword, despite the fact that your competitor is promoting on it).

SEO analysis of competitors during promotion

Experts use both competitors’ sites. It is worth noting that the following are of great importance:

current position of the site in ranking;
volume of search traffic;
keyword relevance;
indexed pages;
quality of incoming links to the domain;

When promoting high-frequency and competitive queries, you cannot ignore competitors’ sites; here, not only the text and occurrences of keywords on the page are evaluated, but also the format of the information presented, as well as the structure of the sites. Most likely, you will need to develop and improve your website according to the current top (if necessary, add “features” that your competitors have, such as “service calculator”, “online consultant”, etc.).

It is quite difficult to fully understand all stages of SEO analysis of competitors, and therefore we suggest you turn to real professionals - the promotion specialists of Artox Media Digital Group. The information received at the start will serve as a starting point for further promotion of your brand, products and services on the market, and conducting an SEO competitor analysis at a later stage will allow you to achieve the desired top. Thanks to the competence of our team, high professionalism and rich experience in solving similar problems, you can be confident in the result.

Why do competitor analysis at all?

I want to immediately warn you about the risks. We will learn to read a competitor's strategy, but we will never have accurate data about whether it works - we can only guess and test.

I will focus on the analysis of online stores, since everything there is more or less easy to compare.

1. Setting goals

Every analysis should begin with setting goals. It is important not just to write down the indicators, but to understand what they tell:

in which areas you need to catch up with your competitors. SEO is still an integrated approach, the result depends on many factors;
what successful points of competitors’ strategy can be adopted;
what strategies competitors are not using. This question is especially relevant if the site being analyzed is a leader in its field.

For example, the following elements of the strategy can be called clearly successful:

creating additional types of pages, creating additional linking;
creating additional benefits for the user: installment plans, credit, discount systems, free delivery;
carrying out work to increase reviews using email newsletters after purchase.

2. Identifying competitor sites

The second important step is to identify your direct competitors.

2.1. Analyze search results for key queries

Explore search results for different groups of queries (high-frequency and mid-frequency) and select resources that are relevant to you and have a similar structure.

Among the selected sites, check the region and see that the structure is similar. Avoid aggregators or sites with broad topics.

If the site is young, the “Competitors” section of Serpstat cannot be used - there will be almost no statistics or only weak competitor sites will be shown, which make no sense to focus on.

2.3. Take information from the client

3. What to analyze and how to draw conclusions?

3.1. Domain age determination

3.2. Attendance comparison

What conclusions can be drawn after comparison:

understand whether there is room for improvement in the topic area;
which competitor has the most traffic and from which channel;
in the future, try to understand why the competitor has so much traffic and connect new channels.

The number of pages in the index can be checked using the "site:" operator.

If the difference between the number of pages in Yandex and Google is too large, then the site contains junk pages or other problems due to which the site is poorly ranked by the search engine.

3.4. Research of the semantic core

First of all, it is worth looking at the semantics of the site being analyzed. This can be done using Serpstat:

Pay special attention to those competitors who have the most words in their semantic core. Next, try to understand why they have so many keywords.

Then you should download competitors’ semantics, which are used to rank competitors’ sites, but not your site.

which competitor has the most keywords;
is there room for improvement in the topic;
what pages can be added or optimized;
what new page types can be added;
in which product groups competitors are outperforming the project in terms of product range.

3.5. Structure analysis

Pay attention to the quality of the structure. Does a competitor bother to create pages? for low-frequency requests? Is the structure organized logically?

Does your competitor have any standard pages that you don’t have? What queries are covered by these pages?

How is the structure expanded: with tags, landing pages or filters?

After the analysis, you can understand the level of optimization of the site structure, the potential for expanding the structure and the direction in which it can be developed.

3.6. Content Comparison

It's important to understand what your competitors are doing in their content strategy.

To do this, we divide the site into types of pages that are useful for promotion:

home page;
categories/subcategories;
product cards;
blog pages;
other typical pages, depending on the niche.

3.6.1. Content analysis of the main, categories/subcategories includes the following points:

how many characters are in the text;
Is text markup used - headings H1, H2, H3;
whether images are used;
whether bulleted and numbered lists are used;
Is the content generally readable?
whether spam methods and keyword inclusion are used.

3.6.2. Content analysis of product cards may include the following items:

are there any informative product descriptions;
how many characters are in the description;
whether the content on product cards is spam;
are all the characteristics given, are there video reviews, reviews and other content useful to the user.

3.6.3. Blog page content research:

how often the content is published;
how many articles are there already;
how many characters does one article contain?
a blog is written based on requests, useful content is simply posted, or company news is just published.

3.7. Meta information analysis

Analysis of Title, Description, Keywords, H1 headings is performed by dividing the site into the same types of pages as when analyzing content strategy:

home page analysis;
analysis of categories/subcategories;
analysis of product cards;
blog page analysis;
analysis of other typical pages.

The following should be taken into account:

is there any keyword spam?
are synonyms used?
only generation templates or manual meta tags are used;
is there a certain structure for constructing meta-information, what is it like;
is information about the unique selling proposition used in meta tags, is a call to action used in the USP; Is the USP clear?

As a result, it is possible to draw conclusions about whether competitors use spam methods, adopt good practices for constructing meta-information into the strategy, and understand the level of optimization of meta-information among competitors.

3.8. Comparison of link strategies

To obtain the necessary data, we use Ahrefs or Serpstat.

What can be compared:

number of referring pages;
number of referring domains;

anchor list (what it looks like: natural/unnatural);

After analyzing the results, you can understand whether the sites are promoting organically, using a mixed approach, or using spammy link building methods.

3.9. Linking analysis

3.10. Availability of https

3.11. Presence of a mobile version of the site

The presence of a mobile version has long become not a feature, but a necessity - in order to reach an additional audience of mobile users. As a result, you can better understand which competitors are reaching the mobile audience and which are missing out on this opportunity.

3.12. Multiregional and multilingual

You should see if competitors have other language or regional versions of the site, as well as separate pages for regional queries.

Regional versions of a website or page for geo-queries may result in greater coverage of key queries.

3.13. Download speed

Analyzed for typical pages, for example:

home page;
categories/subcategories;
product cards;
blog pages;
other standard pages.

The check is performed for both the mobile and desktop versions. You can use Google Page Speed Insights or analogues (for example, GTMetrix, WebPageTest).

The main readings are recorded:

mobile version optimization percentage (N/100);
percentage of desktop version optimization (N/100);
mobile version server response time;
server response time of the desktop version.

If your site's loading speed is very slow compared to your competitors, increasing it should be a priority.

3.14. Social activity analysis

Based on the activities of subscribers and their involvement, you can see which social network should be included in the strategy, if it is not already included. Especially if this channel is active among competitors.

3.15. Business Features Research

The question to ask is: why is a potential customer leaving for a competitor? Analyze possible options.

4. How to structure the results of competitor analysis

But it’s inconvenient to look at the table every time, so I recommend writing down the conclusions based on the results of the analysis of each direction in a simple Google Docs in the format:

[a few words about the situation now];
[what you need to do to get ahead of your competitors].

It is worth noting those points where your project is the leader - you need to know your strengths.

conclusions

When performing a general analysis of sites, you should pay attention to both general characteristics and specific areas that are important for promotion. Depending on the type of business, indicators can be removed or added.

Here are the basic ones:

domain age;
attendance;
number of pages in the index;
semantic core;
Site structure;
content;
meta information;
link strategy;
linking;
availability of https;
availability of a mobile version;
multiregional and multilingual;
download speed;
social activity;
business features.

At the start of work, such a superficial analysis is a must have for a specialist. It shows well the features of the topic and allows you to understand the current situation.

I would be glad to receive additions from you - what else can be analyzed and what will it give?